Miles Rapoport

Miles Rapoport is the president of Demos, a national research and advocacy organization. He was secretary of the state of Connecticut from 1995 to 1998 and served 10 years in the Connecticut legislature.

Recent Articles

AP Photo/Seth Perlman, File People line up to vote in the primary at a precinct in Bradfordton, Illinois. W hen Donald Trump describes next Tuesday’s election as “rigged,” he conflates two things. The first is that “the establishment,” in whatever form, is powerfully arrayed against ordinary Americans and against Trump himself as their tribune. The second, darker and more dangerous, allegation is that the voting process itself cannot be trusted, that even if people come out and vote for him, “massive” voting fraud on Election Day and the manipulation of the count will steal the election from him. The first, though Trump is hardly the best messenger for it, is at least an arguable proposition, and has some resonance in the progressive critique. Trump’s second charge, however, poses a serious threat to our democracy and is an essential tool of authoritarian-leaning demagogues. Just as important: It really can’t happen here. We need to be clear about that, and we also need to be clear...

The 2004 election confounded those who have blamed the flaws in our democracy on apathetic voters, apolitical young people, and a generalized culture of disengagement. More than 120 million citizens cast ballots, a turnout of 60 percent of eligible voters. When something important is at stake, voters will brave barriers. Unfortunately, the large turnout took place despite our election procedures. If the 2000 debacle in Florida showed that we had to modernize the machines used for voting and improve the shoddy list management used to qualify voters, the 2004 elections have given us a new set of procedural reforms necessary for us to have confidence in our election administration. The chaotic, crazy-quilt election administration, run all too often by people with a partisan bent, is a national embarrassment. In the end, we need to summon the national resources and the national will to create and enforce national standards for national elections. In addition to the litany of concrete...

The last day of the election season, I am seized with the same anxieties that so many people are. But we should also take note of some major positives in this election, which are already true, regardless of Tuesday's outcome. They confound some of the accepted critiques of our democracy and create a base to build on for the future. The first and most important is that we are headed toward reversing -- perhaps in a really big way -- the 30-year decline in voter participation that set in after Vietnam and Watergate. A staple of pessimistic analysis of our democracy has been that people just don't care, so they don't bother to vote. Well, not this year. A CBS poll of likely voters taken Sunday indicated that 25 percent have already voted, and estimates of turnout as high as 75 percent in Florida and 80 percent in Connecticut have already been made. The imagery of people waiting in line to vote, undeterred, four days out, is striking and important. The Federal Election Commission...

We both work in New York City, where the deepening inequality documented in the preceding articles is palpable in everyday life. Housing prices in Manhattan recently reached an average of $1 million, a cost that requires annual earnings of about $400,000 to amortize. Looking at the country as a whole, CEOs in the financial sector receive compensation packages in the tens of millions, about 500 times the median household income. Meanwhile, working families struggle to find public schooling for their children, increasing numbers of ordinary people endure two- and three-hour commutes in a desperate search for housing they can afford, the average worker's pay packet has shrunk in real terms since 1979, and the poverty rate has returned to that of 1973. And it is people of color who are disproportionately affected. Our system is entrenching inequality rather than promoting broad upward mobility. As this series of articles has shown, economic and political inequality are mutually...

Six months after the federal Help America Vote Act (HAVA) -- whose passage was sparked by the disputed 2000 presidential vote -- became law, the action on election reform has shifted to the state level. State governments are now charged with implementing the legislation, and while that poses the danger that some states will take the opportunity to cook up new methods for voter suppression, it also offers advocates of election reform the best chance in a long time to improve the way elections are carried out in the states. The issue of election reform has unfortunately received little attention as the drama has moved out of Washington and into state capitals. But the dangers and opportunities presented by HAVA make it a topic that liberals ignore at their own peril. When HAVA -- which earmarked $3.8 billion to the states over the next three years for improvements in voting technology and election administration -- passed in October of last year, its complications and contradictions...